Sunday night, and the screech of a distressed cat outside the flat - once, then twice.
I at once rushed outside, falling over my own body as I threw on clothing, but there was nothing to be seen. It was perfectly dark, and gone 11pm, so I soon gave up the search.
For the rest of the night, though, I was unable to stop thinking about the terrified sounds I'd heard. I sat up until three in the morning, trying to distract myself with books and online newspapers, but the mystery cat superimposed itself over every other experience.
And, of course, my dreams were littered with cats making the noise of a siren - I slept terribly, waking with a headache that has hardly gone away since.
What a hostage to circumstance I am. Only last week I suggested an awakening of sorts: the realisation that events happen independently of us, and the only consistent is that we can react to them in a measured and non-dramatic manner.
Yet an imperilled cat whom I cannot rescue casts a shadow over an entire day. When my grandmother died, I know people were very close to saying: you simply can't let it affect everything in the way you are doing.
Even if it was never said, voices began to talk more slowly; the better, apparently, to convey information into my unheeding mind. Sentences began with the plaintive: Paul, love.... and thereafter an explanation that she isn't coming back.
Now the unknown cat has struck in the night, and I am edgy and ready to leap through my own shadow.
What hope is there for those of us who fail to deal with events? I am overwhelmed by them, the perfect autistic in Bluefish's paradigm. Dare to disturb the surface of the water even slightly, and I panic.
I need Groundhog Day, preferably without any compromised family pets, in a silent, blind universe.
